Olympic Hockey Preview, Part One

I thought I'd cull together information from some sources to go over the 12 teams in the upcoming Men's Olympic Hockey Tournament. I'll certainly watch some of the Women's tournament, but I won't be into it enough to preview it.

The IIHF website has this handy schedule, although it's in local time in Torino; subtract 6 hours for EST. Also, the complete rosters can be found there, as are the world rankings referenced below.

NHL referees will be used, and we're supposed to see the obstruction crackdown continue. If the players relapse and the refs don't then we should see special teams (power play and penalty kill) play a huge role. I supsect the players won't relapse, as fewer "muckers" will make the all-star-like rosters and they will be using the wider (by 13.5 feet) international ice surface. The neutral zone will also be larger at the expense of the offensive zones, more like the pre-lockout NHL. ESPN has the other major rules differences.

The twelve participants are divided into two preliminary round-robin pools; the top four in each group will advance to the medal round for a single-elimination tournament. This is a change from the first two Olympiads with NHL players, where they had two four-team preliminary pools, the winners of each advanced to join another four-team pool consisting of themselves and the six "big" nations (USA, Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Czech Rep.). Since the NHL would not shut down in time for the preliminary pool, the seventh-best team, Slovakia, got hosed--their players could only play the early games if their NHL teams consented to let them go early. Germany, whose hopes have always ridden on Washington Captials goalie Olaf Kolzig, also got screwed over. I'm glad they've finally rectified this. The two groups (World Ranking in parentheses)

Group A:
Canada (1), Czech Republic (3), Finland (7), Switzerland (8), Germany (10), Italy (19)
Group B:
Sweden (2), Slovakia (4), Russia (5), USA (6), Latvia (9), Kazakhstan (15)

Sometime before the tournament starts a week from Wednesday, I'll get previews of each of those two groups up. They'll largely be based on my personal compilation and interpretation of "experts" that I'll be sure to link to & reference, but I'll interject my original thoughts (if I have any) as well.